The Left, Not Kellyanne Conway, Invented 'Alternative Facts'

And the left, more than the right, has grasped the political implications of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems. The implications, for those of us who struggled with math, were elegantly summed up by Siobhan Roberts in the June 29, 2016 New Yorker, that admirable bastion of the center left:

Gödel’s masterpiece was his incompleteness theorem, which ranks in scientific folklore with Einstein’s relativity and Heisenberg’s uncertainty. Promulgated in Vienna in the early nineteen-thirties, the notion of incompleteness threw mathematics into a hall of mirrors, where it reflected upon itself to alluring, if disorienting, effect: the theorem proved, using mathematics, that mathematics could not prove all of mathematics. Of course, it has a proper and technically precise formulation, but the late logician Verena Huber-Dyson paraphrased it for me as follows: “There is more to truth than can be caught by proof.” Or, as the British novelist Zia Haider Rahman put it in his award-winning début, “In the Light of What We Know,” “Within any given system, there are claims which are true but which cannot be proven to be true.”

The field of semiotics, also, has a left-wing cast. For example, as noted in Wikipedia, “Roland Barthes (1915–1980) was a French literary theorist and semiotician. He often would critique pieces of cultural material to expose how bourgeois society used them to impose its values upon others.”

When you hear concepts like “gender is a social construct” you’ve probably entered The Semiotics Zone. The left’s ability to declare that while simultaneously embracing the immortal words of Lady Gaga from “Born This Way” is a marvel of mental agility.

Semiotics’ cousin Deconstruction also is mostly a Thing of the left. It’s nicely summarized by philosophybasics.com:

Deconstructionism (or sometimes just Deconstruction) is a 20th Century school in philosophy initiated by Jacques Derrida in the 1960s. It is a theory of literary criticism that questions traditional assumptions about certainty, identity, and truth; asserts that words can only refer to other words; and attempts to demonstrate how statements about any text subvert their own meanings.

You just didn’t see too many people at Trump rallies brandishing placards blazoned with quotes from Derrida. You’re more likely to encounter his writings at Berkeley. That said, it’s Derrida’s world. We just live in it.

The left also pioneered the wholesale political use of Weaponized Narrative, in which the storyline takes on more salience than facts. I have previously written about one of its most brilliant tacticians, Patrick Reinsborough, an arch-nemesis whom I greatly admire. Do not miss his essay Giant Whispers.

This is tactically brilliant. As Napoleon once said “Imagination rules the world.” Yet use of narrative also compromises the left's chastity, undermining claims to legitimacy in attacking the use of Narrative by, say, Donald Trump. Dramatic License goes both ways.

When proponents of the left’s Narrative seek to defend themselves by claiming that their facts are “real” and those of their opponents are not they, mainly, are backsliding into Modernism. Reread your Lyotard.

To vastly oversimplify (and maybe even mangle) classical rhetorical theory there are four common modes of discourse: description, exposition, argumentation, and narration. The first three, politically speaking, are weak. Few minds are changed by argument no matter how much conservatives relish that mode. We should get a clue.

The fourth mode, narration, is strong. Narrative is driven by plot not exposition. The left is far more proficient at deploying narrative than is the right. Facts herein are subsidiary.

So let's be aware of some of the internal contradictions when left-wing polemicists attack people like Kellyanne Conway or her boss. My favorite left-wing polemicist is Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi. His invective surpasses that of Donald Trump. Here he is on The End of Facts in the Trump Era:

This gets to the heart of a chilling truth that much of educated America has yet to face about the Trump era. Amid all the howling about Trump's deceptions, the far more upsetting story is the mandate behind them – not so much the death of truth in politics, but the irrelevance of it.

Taibbi's propaganda is utterly first rate. Also, when you think about it in context, hilarious. One marvels at the curious quiet of postmodernists, semioticians, deconstructionists, and pundits of the left-leaning variety. These latter may be presumed to be well familiar with the provenance of “Alternative Facts” and the role of the left in fostering our current political culture.

Most of the left-wing Commentariat defaulted at a strategically “teachable moment.” Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.

In the final analysis one is reminded of Pandora and her jar. As recorded by Hesiod in his Theogony:

I will give men as the price for fire an evil thing in which they may all be glad of heart while they embrace their own destruction.’ … For ere this the tribes of men lived on earth remote and free from ills and hard toil and heavy sickness which bring the Keres (Fates) upon men; for in misery men grow old quickly. But the woman [Pandora] took off the great lid of the jar with her hands and scattered all these and her thought caused sorrow and mischief to men. Only Elpis (Hope) remained there in an unbreakable home within under the rim of the great jar….

Yes, definitely, let us deplore Fake News. I do, unequivocally. Yet there is more here than meets the eye: “An evil thing in which they may all be glad of heart while they embrace their own destruction” as taught to us by Hesiod. And it was, predominantly, the left that opened our own peculiar Pandora’s jar.

Luckily for us all, whether conservative or progressive, as Hesiod teaches ... Hope remains “in an unbreakable home within the rim of the great jar.” Hesiod, prophetically, was foretelling the advent of Hope Hicks, President Trump’s White House Director of Strategic Communications.

The left is getting blown up with its own IED. Its flimsy crusade against Conway, like its flimsy crusade against Bannon, is designed for one purpose and one purpose only: to isolate, and weaken, Donald Trump. The left, not Kellyanne Conway, created "Alternative Facts."